Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)
Rachael Ray: God’s Gift to the Meat-and-Potatoes Crowd
Excellent recipes for those of us on a high-carb, high-protein dietBy Bob Wire, 1-03-11
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| "We'll be using some special mushrooms today. Make sure you have plenty of Pink Floyd and Captain Beefheart on hand!" | |
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The recipe on the Rachael Ray website was for something called Cheeseburger Chili Mac and Cheese. Right there in the title were four of my favorite foods: Cheeseburgers, chili, macaroni, and more cheese. It was perfect. A one-dish meal that practically cooks itself, and will make me a dinnertime hero in the eyes of my hungry family.
Before Barb and I married back in the previous century, I only knew how to cook three things: Meatloaf, spaghetti, and leftover meatloaf. Having children and working from home has forced me to broaden my epicurean horizons over the years, and I’ve expanded that range to eight or ten things. I’d been doing quite a bit of the cooking lately, and my limited repertoire was becoming more difficult to disguise. “Hey, Dad,” one of the kids would say as I served up another meal. “Didn’t we just have chicken nuggets last night?”
I’d spoon a helping onto her plate and say, “This is different, although I should point out that the nugget is the most desirable part of the chicken. This is an Italian dish called Chicken Parmigiana Cacciatore, uh, Pesci DeNiro.”
“But this is just chicken nuggets with spaghetti sauce.”
“Shut up and drink your Rice-a-Roni.”
As you can see, I was facing down a dinner table mutiny. So I turned to Rachael Ray, the saucy, raspy-voiced maven of daytime TV cooking shows. I’d gotten hooked on her act while working out on an elliptical machine at the gym. I usually show up mid-morning, after the Chatty Cathys have thinned out, and run a few miles on the machine while watching Rachael’s show on the overhead TV. She always starts out with some sort of talk-show segment about helping a charitable foundation by hosting a cook-off on a frozen lake, or ten places your boyfriend needs to have waxed, or reuniting long-lost conjoined twins who’d become separated and then lost track of each other. I pretty much tune this part out, waiting for her to hit the kitchen.
The last part of her show is a segment called “What’s For Dinner,” which is perfect, because even though it’s not even lunchtime yet, I’m usually thinking about the evening meal. Rachael Ray’s cooking projects are geared toward meat-and-potato guys like me. She doesn’t use a lot of weirdo vegetables from countries whose government gets overthrown every other year, and she doesn’t particularly try to keep things low-fat or tastelessly healthy. It’s pretty much regular food that can be prepared and recognized by normal people. Lots of pork chops, ground beef, chicken breasts, you know, the five-pound bags of rice of the meat world. So when she whipped up a big ol’ batch of Cheesy Chili Mac with Cheese while I salivated on the elliptical, I knew what was for dinner.
As I left the gym I bumped into a local TV weatherman I frequently see there. “You must have had quite a workout,” he remarked, pointing to my drenched t-shirt.
I looked down at the spreading wetness on my chest. “Not really. It’s drool.”
When I got home I pulled up the Cheesy Chili Mac with Cheese recipe off Rach’s website (her fans just call her Rach), and was delighted to discover that I had all the ingredients. The recipe said it made four servings. Serve with a simple salad, it said. What other kind of salad is there? A bowl of greens and a math test on the side? Simple it is.
While Rusty shoveled the driveway, Speaker volunteered to help me put this thing together. If you know anything about Rach, you know she loves her some extra virgin olive oil, or EVOO, as she calls it. Everything she makes starts with EVOO. Hot chocolate? Two teaspoons of EVOO. Peanut butter and jelly sandwich? Don’t forget the EVOO! So I upended the bottle and circled it two times around the pan, as instructed. Then I browned the lean ground beef and drained off the juice. That was my first mistake.
“We need two cups of beef stock,” said Speaker, reading from the printout. We didn’t have any beef stock, so I prepared a package of ramen noodles and used the broth from that. Hey, we had to have something for lunch. I boiled a box of elbow macaroni, but it was too soon. It sat there and vulcanized in the pot while I simmered the rest of the stuff, chili powder, onions and ramen juice, with the dry hamburger in the pan. (That was another thing: the recipe kept alternating between “pot” and “pan,” which confused me enough to open a bottle of wine.)
Eventually it was all pretty much the same color so I dumped it into the pot with the languishing elbow macaroni. I mixed it up, then tasted a sample spoonful. Bland as a hotel bar cover band. “Needs salt,” I said, quoting Clint Eastwood’s short-lived restaurant review column in the L.A. Times.
The recipe actually called for ketchup and yellow mustard, which had me wondering if it was ghost-written by an eight-year-old. We added a few more random spices and then dumped the mess into the pre-greased casserole dish, like it said in the recipe. The large dish barely held half of it. I looked at the recipe again. Sure enough, it said “serves four.” Four what? Families? Marine battalions? Small island nations?
We covered the top with grated cheddar, and put it in the oven just before Barb got home from work. I made a simple salad (one kid doesn’t like cukes, the other kid doesn’t like tomatoes, and so on. All salads at the Wire household contain one ingredient: lettuce). We enjoyed the cheesy, but somewhat dry and still oddly tasteless meal. And then enjoyed it again two nights later. Speaker took a thermos of it for lunch today, and I’m staring down a steaming mound of it in the microwave as I write this. It’s the dish that keeps on dishing.
Next time I’ll get a little more adventurous. There’s a wild-sounding recipe I’d like to try, as soon as we finish off the supply of Cheesy Chili Mac with Cheese. It’s called Cowboy Spaghetti with Cheddar Cheese Sauce. Lip-smackin’, baby! I can feel myself binding up already.
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Comments
"White Trash Cooking"
http://www.amazon.com/White-Cooking-Jargon-Ernest-Mickler/dp/0898151899
The Rachael Ray's of the world are about showing working mothers that there is a way to not have pizza or KFC for 'most every meal. You can cook things, and use actual ingredients out of those barrels in bulk, and spend little and eat well. My wife and I try to live on a budget of $400 a month for food and entertainment, including eating out on occasion. I got into cooking salt free and low fat when her heart went gunny bag and she got the bi-ventricle defibbing pacemaker. And to cook like that, you read a shit load of labels and finally figure out it is the hippy grocery and the outside of the SuperValu where you shop. Fresh veggies, meat, cheese, dairy, bread and you are at the checkout after filling plastic sacks at the bulk arena for an hour. I have cooked every bean known to man. We have eaten stuff we never would have considered.
So now we are five years down the road and I have somehow ended up with all the cooking responsibility. And grocery shopping. I became a cheap SOB...and right now I have to go and make Danish meatballs and celery root, which we will have with orange cranberry sauce, boiled red cabbage, and coleslaw. Our Scandinavian root cellar winter dinner, and all the farts that follow. Maybe hit the other sauce and sleep well, and evidently get up late. And why not? Dawn comes about noon. And dusk before Ellen is on the tube. Not unlike those Danes who spend the winter staying up all night bullshitting around a table of food and booze. Ole Bob Wire ought to get a fellowship to some Danish university (they all speak better English than I), and spend a couple of years in the ultimate welfare state drinking and eating the winter nights away. His family would enjoy the time away from this place and the Wire outfit is used to a cold winter.
Getting less dependent upon cotton, and even more so on tobacco, the issue of cheap sugar is still with us. Sugar employs the most people of any one industry in Mexico. All Mexican food is required to have Mexican grown sugar if sugar is used. Their soda pop, including Coke and other brands, is made with Mexican cane sugar in Mexico.
Lots of sugar cane still grown in Cuba, and in other tropical hot climates. And working the cane fields is still dirty, pollution filled, with snakes and spiders and about everything that can bite you in that part of the world. And the canes are still sharp and cut you, and the work is hard, and the hours in heat bad for you. All to make food for us that makes Americans obese. Satisfied with the food, but way too fat. You do have to wonder if the social cost is worth it. And the alternatives we are getting, the Frankenbeet Round-Up Ready from Dow sugar beet seed developers, has lost a court case and I live in the epicenter of sugar beet seed growing, and the Frankenbeet seed growers are under a court order to rip them out as a biological threat to native plants. Genetically altered pesticide resistance isn't passing muster due to other plants that might share pollen with sugar beets. (Brassicas?) We live in interesting times. Bio-threats on one hand, and inhumane work on the other, all to sweeten food at the lowest cost per unit, not the lowest risk to health per unit.
Sugar was the dominant reason for the slave trade out of West Africa in the first place. And sugar was made by grinding up humans at a very high rate in a climate not really meant for human habitation. Or at the least, not for humans to have to work twelve or more hours a day in. I believe I read once that few lived longer than 10 years on the Island of Hispanola. On the other hand, a recently published scholarly accounting of the slave trade drawn for over 30,000 financial accountings of slaver voyages, primarily from England and Portugal, shows that according to those books only 4% of the slave trade was with the U.S. The more temperate climate lacking the huge array of diseases, parasites, parasitism, and cultural violence by plantation management actually was kinder to human life than the life expectancy of those living in West Africa. Evidently, according to this take on the slave trade, the U.S. had little need to bolster the slave numbers as they were able to have generational replacement in that population. Ugly as it was, and inhumane, the issue of human life expectancy in the U.S., no matter your status, race, religion, cultural origin, was not as dire as we once were taught. Or so the PBS radio broadcast seemed to say. And I can hear things wrong, as well. Tractor noise and old age make for incorrect processing of information. Evidently, Wisconsin is better for healthy living than the Ivory Coast. Or Haiti. I find that believable. Only I think that all those "hot dish" dinners in Wisconsin, steeped in cheese, salt, and starches, might plug arteries and put you six feet under long before you wanted. The tuna casserole laced with canned peas, with rebaked corn flakes on top. AAAgggghhhhh!!! I should be reprimanded for complaining about having more than enough to eat when so many don't. But I will pass on any dish topped with corn flakes as I have for so many years. Corn flakes are for breakfast. With milk. And blueberries. Always blueberries. Eat more blueberries. Please.
I get to watch football because I spent the afternoon making meatballs, now simmering in celery root and white sauce. Petite onions and new peas, pickled beets, a cranberry orange salad and no bread to complete the meal. Ya, shure. Ya betcha... Mudder didn't want sweet and sour red cabbage. So we are eating light.
Is it the Florida quarterback who got his BA in three years, his masters this year, and still has a year of eligibility to do the 4 years of play in 5 years?? Another Masters, or has he been accepted for a PhD program???
The Stanford QB is a scholar at Stanford. I also see that Arizona State has Tillman Scholar for a QB...those QB types have to be smart today. But the Offensive linemen, especially the center, have to be even smarter. The center has to call the blocking assignments every time the QB audibles at the line...and after college, you see the Stanford and Cal linemen working in the SF financial district, playing club rugby and getting red cheeks and noses as they age. I wish I were young enough to be around for all the change that will happen in the next half century....